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‘IS brides’ open up in Syria camp documentary at SXSW
LOS ANGELES, March 17, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – “Okay, um… My name’s Shamima. I’m
from the UK. I’m 19.”
Spoken with a nervous laugh, the introduction to a room full of women and
restless babies could be the start of any young mothers’ support group.
But the speaker is Shamima Begum, the teenage “ISIS bride” who left Britain
for Syria in 2015 to join the Islamic State group, and whose desire to return
sparked a right-wing press frenzy that saw her stripped of her citizenship.
The footage is captured in “The Return: Life After ISIS,” a documentary
premiering Wednesday at the online Texas-based South By Southwest festival.
Spanish director Alba Sotorra got rare, extensive access to Begum and other
Western women over several months in Syria’s Kurdish-run Roj camp, where they
remain following the so-called caliphate’s collapse in 2019.
“I would say to the people in the UK, give me a second chance because I was
still young when I left,” Begum tells the filmmakers.
“I just want them to put aside everything they’ve heard about me in the
media,” she adds.
Begum left her London home aged just 15 to travel to Syria with two school
friends, and married an IS fighter.
She was “found” by British journalists, heavily pregnant at another Syrian
camp, in February 2019 — and her apparent lack of remorse in initial
interviews drew outrage.
But Begum and fellow Westerners including US-born Hoda Muthana strike a
very different and apologetic tone in Sotorra’s film.
The documentary follows “workshop” sessions in which the women write
letters to their younger selves expressing regret about their departures for
Syria, and plant a tree to remember their loved ones.
“It was known that Syria was a warzone and I still travelled into it with
my own children — now how I did this I really don’t know looking back,” says
one Western woman.
Begum recalls feeling like an “outsider” in London who wanted to “help the
Syrians,” but claims on arrival she quickly realized IS were “trapping
people” to boost the so-called caliphate’s numbers and “look good for the
(propaganda) videos.”
– ‘A mistake’ –
Sotorra, the director, gained camp access thanks to Kurdish fighters she
had followed in Syria for her previous film.
She set out to document the Kurdish women’s sacrifices in running a camp
filled with their former enemies’ wives and children, but soon pivoted to the
Western women.
“I will never be able to understand how a woman from the West can take this
decision of leaving everything behind to join a group that is committing the
atrocities that ISIS is committing,” Sotorra told AFP.
“I do understand now how you can make a mistake.”
On Sotorra’s arrival in March 2019, the women — fresh from a warzone —
were “somehow blocked… not thinking and not feeling.”
“Shamima was a piece of ice when I met her,” Sotorra told AFP.
“She lost the kid when I was there… it took a while to be able to cry,”
she recalled.
“I think it’s just surviving, you need to protect yourself to survive.”
Another factor is the enduring presence of “small but very powerful” groups
of even “more radicalized women” who remain loyal to IS and exert pressure on
their campmates.
“We had (other) women who joined in the beginning, and then they received
pressure from other women so they stopped coming,” said Sotorra.
In the film, Begum claims she “had no choice but to say certain things” to
journalists “because I lived in fear of these women coming to my tent one day
and killing me and killing my baby.”
– ‘Took them a while’ –
The question of what can and should be done with these women — and their
children — plagues Western governments, sowing divisions among allies.
Last month, Britain’s Supreme Court rejected Begum’s bid to return to
challenge a decision stripping her citizenship on national security grounds.
How much the women knew about — and abetted — IS’s rapes, tortures and
beheadings may never be known.
In the documentary, Begum denies she “knew about” or “supported these
crimes,” dismissing claims she could have been in IS’s feared morality police
as a naive “15-year-old with no Islamic knowledge” who did not even “speak
the language.”
“I never even had a parking ticket back in my own country before… I never
harmed anybody, I never killed anybody, I never did anything,” says Canadian
Kimberly Polman.
An incredulous Kurdish woman points out that “maybe your husband killed my
cousin.”
Sotorra believes the women could be useful back home in preventing the same
mistake in future generations, and points to the cruelty of raising young
children in this environment.
“It took them a while to realise that they have responsibility for (their)
choice… they cannot just think ‘Okay, I regret, I go back, as if nothing
has happened,'” she said.
“No, it’s not about this… you have to accept the consequences.”
BSS/AFP/FI/ 0909 hrs